The General Intellect

The general intellect is a concept Karl Marx developed in a notebook written in 1858 and not published until 1939 — the so-called Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse. Marx predicted that at a certain stage of capitalist development, the productive force of labor would no longer reside primarily in individual workers but in the collective knowledge, technical skill, and creative capacity of the entire working population, embedded in the machinery of production. When this stage arrived, Marx believed, the contradiction between collective production and private appropriation would become untenable. The machine that embodied collective knowledge could not be owned by a few. Berardi and the Italian Autonomist tradition — Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato — spent decades analyzing why Marx was right about the direction and wrong about the outcome.